Jessica was drifting . . .
Her father’s voice, stern and unfriendly, seemed near and yet very far away. She hadn’t meant to disobey him. Not really. But he didn’t have the right to tell her what to do any more. She was a grown-up with a mind of her own. Robert popped into her head. She wondered if he was searching for her. Of course he was, they adored each other. They had a future together, no matter what her father said. In her mind’s eye, she pictured Robert as he was when she’d last seen him, happy and smiling when she told him of her plans to cut loose from her father and find work abroad.
How long ago was that?
A day?
A week?
Jessica held this image.
She felt good and warm and . . .
She began to cry.
No! She couldn’t afford to cry. Tears were no longer an expression of how unhappy she was but precious drops of liquid she needed to stay alive.
‘Stop snivelling!’ Her father’s voice again.
Did the man have no compassion?
‘Dad?’ she called out into the darkness. ‘Dad? Dad? Dad? Dad?’
Please, Dad, find me before it’s too late.
Jessica looked down at the rising water, wondering how long it took for a person to drown. She’d read somewhere that drowning was once used to determine if women were witches or not, the suggestion being that the guilty would stay afloat while the innocent would not.
Well, she was innocent and she didn’t want to drown.
Not here . . .
And suddenly, all she could think of was water rushing into her body, both her stomach and her airways, pushing out the oxygen and causing untold panic as she tried, at first, to hold her breath . . .
And then?
She would try to draw breath even when fully submerged, setting off a catastrophic chain of events leading to . . .
Asphyxia . . .
Cerebral hypoxia . . .
Myocardial infarction . . .
Death.
Please, Robert, find me.